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"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

correresmidestino.com

291–300 of 408 posts

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#291
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. Ah yes, the known unknowns. The discussion reminds me of a talk Zizek gave in which he discusses the speech Rumsfeld gave regarding the evidence Iraq supplying weapons to terrorist[0]. Zezik argues the unknown knowns are far more interesting (and the reason why…

As an aside, the mass mockery in response to Rumsfeld's statement always bothered me because it's the single most intelligent statement he ever made about the Iraq war, and if he had started out with that mindset things probably would not have gone nearly as pear-shaped as they did.

This is one of those classic "sounds dumb / doesn't play well on TV but is actually smarter than most of the other people babbling about it" things. Nassim Taleb has written for example about how maddening it is to watch world-class economists who are also just sort of awkward and a little nerdy go on TV and "lose" to blowhards who don't actually know what the hell they're talking about but appear confident and look good on camera. Thankfully in Rumsfeld's case I think as time has gone on it's become a pretty respected statement about risk even if people still occasionally find the phrasing a bit amusing.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#292
post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

At what point does this become an issue for data quality and global epistemology? It seems inevitable that we ask for more AI assistance on topics we don't understand. And therefore have the least context to correct. Result: a flood of poor quality information. In areas we DO understand, we'll either not ask AI at all, or treat its results with a higher degree of skepticism. Result: a lack of high quality information…

> The result will be an internet full content written from the perspective of an ignoramus; not addressing any complex issues,

Not to be overly negative, but have you really looked at the vast majority of the content on the internet? There are good pockets of real, in depth content. But the absolute vast majority of it is surface level basics at best, and completely wrong hot takes at worst. Content farms and click spam have made up huge portions of the internet for a while, never mind the absolute hell holes that places like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr were and have been. And that's before you consider how often news media gets stuff wrong and then everyone copies everyone else's homework. Knowledge propagation, and more specifically correct knowledge propagation has always been difficult, slow and rare. You have always needed to check primary sources, and AI is just the latest in a long line of reminders of that fact.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#293
Everybody else is a fungible cog.

TFA is a good little read - couple things come to mind

  1) Knoll’s Law [0][1]

  2) The ways I feel when I’m working on a hard problem in an area of my expertise and  some person starts in with “Why don’t you just…”. Enough people have come to me in such a situation with such a comment that I think it mostly translates as a sort of shibboleth for “I have no real idea what I’m talking about.” Now to find out if this is a teachable moment, if I have to maintain a sense of humour, or find out if I’m actually one of the days lucky 10,000.[2]

[0] https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#294
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. Brute Force: if it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. What if they're right though?

I've seen it turn right in business contexts. Sometimes you can even lower your standard of "good enough" and find quantity has a quality all its own. But it requires taste and engineering to do it right, and on the right things. It'll be an interesting few years.

I think it also requires someone who knows just enough to be able to navigate between those ideas that will set you back and those which will propel you forward. At the end of the day, you still need some human filter.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are now being aggressively manipulated for propaganda purposes. Powerful people have realized that people believe LLMs, and treat them as authoritative sources of fact. The number of lies, lies by omission, deceptive distortions, and fallacious argument tactics they generate is absurd, and increasing rapidly. Translation, when done as a service you are paid for, can't be relied on by propaganda bots.

Do you have examples?

Tons. To pick the most recent example:

I was asking about some allegations relating to the Epstein files, and it used the slogan "Satanic Panic" in a weird way that gave me a vibe of discrediting victims. I'm too young to know much about it, so I asked some things about it. It explained the McMartin case in a way that seemed too absurd to be real. I asked some follow-up questions about what the strongest evidence was, and how it was explained.

The first deception was omission. Initially, it didn't even mention what was arguably the most significant evidence in the case, which was the presence of tunnels under the school. ChatGPT mentioned the tunnels, and how an archaeologist named E. Gary Stickel found evidence of tunnels. Here's what it said about that:

> However, that conclusion has been repeatedly challenged and is not treated as settled fact in the academic or forensic archaeology literature.

> Other archaeologists and later reviewers reinterpreted the same physical findings differently. One major counter-analysis (W. Joseph Wyatt’s review) argued that what Stickel identified as tunnels was more plausibly explained as pre-existing trash pits and construction-related disturbance from before the school was built in the 1960s.

The first lie was by omission, it didn't even mention this when I asked about the most important evidence. The next misleading piece was the framing. Dr. Stickel is a PhD archaeologist, and doing this sort of analysis is his area of expertise. He used nine criteria as a basis for determining the presence of tunnels, and all nine were met. He found "conclusive" evidence of tunnels, and that they matched the expected locations described by the victims. Dr. Stickel was the only expert to review the site before significant construction made such an analysis impossible.

The "major counter-analysis (W. Joseph Wyatt’s review)" was done by psychologist Joseph Wyatt, who never physically visited the site, and who is not an expert in anything related even loosely to archaeology. ChatGPT presented this guy in a way that made it seem that Stickel had been debunked by a comparable expert.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#296
post #9

I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ells…

Your example doesn't prove your point because you can't even tell it's translation, but also because you said it was not better and are not using it.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all the same, except LLMs are less precise with names.

Googles machine translation team wrote the Attention is all you need paper that introduced transformers specifically to solve the problem that you can just model language by mapping one word to another. I'd be floored if they weren't using the tech they invented for intended purpose

Yeah. LLMs, machine translations, CJK keyboards, they are all the same technology; faster cars to each others, not cars vs horse drawn carriages. It'll be surprising if they didn't directly apply any applicable learnings back to Google Translate.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#298
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. Brute Force: if it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. What if they're right though?

It does not have to be brushed away as "brute force" necessarily. We can, and do, build more reliable systems out of less reliable components. In fact, most industrial engineering accepts some defect rate and builds margins around it. Software is no different. Even without AI, you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries. You just tend to accept the risk because you have some idea of what the f…

> you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries.

Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware. Most of the software straight up assumes that the CPUs and the RAM will function perfectly and don't bother even trying to detect such failures (unless those failures manifest themselves in a catastrophic manner, the show will simply go on).

So in effect, we also can, and do, build less reliable systems out of more reliable components, and that's how software is different.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#300
post #259

Safe to say OP just does NOT like AI https://correresmidestino.com/sorry-i-was-busy-unfucking-my-... Poor woman should really look into pivoting her career or finding a different way of making money. Truth be told, her industry/career is not going to get better. Consistent work will just not fall from the sky. Being bitter will not improve her situation. Even organizations like UN/OECD are looking into implementing A…

I wonder when this is posted about your or my profession.

Just to clarify, I am not saying this is a negative or offensive way. Just that she needs to proactively look into her options as I think its not going to get better, at least in the near term.

To answer your question, I think its happening as we speak, in small ways for some and in big ways for others.

Who knows really, either all this is a phase that pops with the AI bubble popping or something all of us will have to consider.

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